Scored way below practice AAMC FLs, need advice for retake

Question

I am at a point where I do not know what to do anymore. I have taken the mcat twice already. I scored 491 my first time but I will admit that I needed to study more. My second time I studied a lot (in 3 months), while having a part time job. I went through all the AAMC material and reviewed all of the questions. I had made anki flashcards as well. I had taken the AAMC FL three times now (When I took my first exam (2017), and twice when studying my second time(2019) after over a year of not taking them). My initial FL score for 1,2 3, and sample for my second attempt was 500, 503,502, 502 . I then went through exams, section banks( avg. 50/60%) and q packs, thoroughly reviewing every question. If I got a question wrong, I wouldn't just try to understand the answer to that question. I would MAKE SURE I understood the content that related to that question. So one question could sometimes lead to an hour of understanding content. My FL scores 1,2, and sample before my exam were 513, 514, 512. I felt I at least got over 500. Turns out my actual mcat score came to be 495 (124,122,125,124). I'm pretty depressed about this and have exhausted all the AAMC materials. I want to retake but would like some advise on what materials to use and study tips for my next attempt. And I did get enough sleep the night before the exam (9hrs), and I did not feel overly stressed/anxious. I don't know what I did wrong. Do I need to do more content review, go through section banks again, take third party exams? Please help.

Answer 1

It sounds like your content knowledge is doing really well! Perhaps the issue is not with your content knowledge, but with standardized exam familiarity. Half of any MCAT problem (apart from discrete questions) is figuring out what the question is asking and finding the key piece of information in the passage used to answer it. It appears that when you have the correct information, you can choose the correct answer, which makes things like Q-banks skew a little high. In order to practice this, I would advise buying packs from third parties, primarily Kaplan or Next Step as they have the most accurate passages, rather than focusing on simple content review. If you have any other questions, let me know!